Data Can Be Beautiful

We are working with large amounts of Facebook data. BeehiveID is, at its heart, an algorithm and an algorithm is always growing and changing as we get new data and draw conclusions based on existing data.

Below is a representation of Alex’s Facebook profile. You can see he has a rich, deep network of connections to some people.  But if you look on the periphery, you see a ring of isolated blue dots.  These are the people that have no connection to him other than an initial friend request.  You can’t really see this in Facebook at all, but once you visualize it in a graph, it is immediately apparent.

Facebook Social Graph
[Click to zoom in for awesome detail]

In our experience, most profiles are like this – about 20% to 30% of the connections are totally isolated.  Of course, this begs the question – why do we have these people in our networks at all, if we never interact with them?